Journal

Chapter 1

I dash down the isolated street racing past cars that no longer work. The empty roads become an obstacle course. Dash left, dash right, jump over the fallen tree stump, or the skeletal remains.

This is the post-apocalyptic world that I live in now. The plague destroyed the planet and humanity. The government blamed the plague. I blamed the people that brought it here. My grandmother would always tell me “Trust no one Cali”. I didn’t.

I came across her journal that I forgot I took with me on my travels. She died during the first wave. She worked for the government in a lab. That’s all she would tell me. I couldn’t know more than that. When she passed away, my younger brother and I made her a grave in the backyard of our family home. Our parents passed when we were young and my grandmother took us in. Things took a dramatic turn when she died.

While Cayden, my brother, and I were searching for supplies in an corner store, her journal slipped out of my backpack. I felt something inside of me pressuring me to read it.

I remember the day I took it out of my grandmother’s room, Cayden wanted me to leave it there and bury it with her. “What if it has all her secrets?” He argued. I didn’t care about that. This journal is the only thing of my grandmother’s that will tell her story. Of course, I wanted to keep it.

After we left the convenience store with only a few bags of chips and a lighter, we made our way back to our hideout. Our old high school. I would’ve graduated this year. Cayden the following year.

I opened the journal and realized that this was the journal that my grandmother kept notes of her work. Experience, after experience were in the journal. Some failures and some success. I scanned through her journal when one particular entry caught my eye.

The Invaders

The only thing related to invaders that I could think of was the stories my grandmother would always tell me about Aliens. She started telling me these stories when I was ten.

“One day Cali the world as we know won’t be the same. You have to look after your brother. Trust no one but each other. They’re already here and they want to change everything.”

I thought her stories weren’t true because of her secret job. I thought she was toying with me. Little did I know, my grandmother knew a lot then she let on.

The journal entry starts by the date the invaders first invaded our planet. September 1, 2001. Terrorist attacks that happened were because of the aliens, according to my grandmother. They wanted the humans on the earth to turn against each other. They wanted war to break out, which it did, so that they could come and be the earth’s saviors. They wanted humans to worship them. How did my grandmother know so much?

I read a few more entries and one made me catch my breath.

“I befriended one of them.”

That’s how the entry starts. Befriended? Befriended an alien? My grandmother never mentioned that in any of her stories. It’s dated in the year 2018. Sadly, my grandmother passed at the end of 2019. The plague happened in 2020.

There’s nothing else written in the journal after that single line. I wonder if the alien she befriended did something to her.

When I closed the journal disappointed that it doesn’t give me more information, a picture slips on and falls in my lap. Picking it up, I notice my grandmother right away. Her beautiful smile graces the image and her thick long brown hair is tied back. Her two dimples are there. Her eyes also have a twinkle. That means the guy standing next to her must have meant a lot to her. That’s a smile I thought she reserved for my brother and I. I don’t recognize the man. He has dirty blond short hair and thick framed glasses. He looks happy next to my grandmother.

In the image there is a circle that has been hand drawn in marker around the necklace my grandmother is wearing. I know this necklace. She never takes it off. I flipped the photo over hoping that there’s a date that will tell me when the picture was taken but the only words there are: “The key to save humanity.”

I gasped. Suddenly it hits me. I jump up from the ground which alerts my brother.

“What’s wrong?” He’s in protective mode.

“The locket!” I whisper-shout. You never know who’s listening.

He looks at me confused. I hand him the photo and point to the necklace our grandmother is wearing. He turns it over and I notice the moment he’s connected the dots.

“Do you really think it’s in the locket?” He asks skeptically.

“It has to be.” I sound confident.

The problem is, the locket was buried with my grandmother. If we can get to the locket, maybe we can find out what’s important in there. My grandmother wrote on that photo that it was the key. If we can try to save the world and try to rebuild it, that’s what we need to do. My grandmother would’ve wanted us to do that.

“Trust no one but each other.”

That leads me back to the present, Cayden and I are running through the streets. The only sounds we hear are our footsteps and our panting.

We have to get that locket.

That locket is buried with our grandmother.

That locket may be the key to save humanity.

That heart-shaped locket!